Aerith Gainsborough

Aerith Gainsborough is a character from the Final Fantasy VII series who is portrayed as kind and gentle, eager to help her friends to the best of her ability. She is typically seen wearing a pink ribbon in her hair, a pink dress with short brown coat, and brown boots. In the game Crisis Core, she wears a white sleeveless dress.

She is also one of Cloud's potential love interests. She was previously dating and in love with Zack Fair.

She is first introduced as a flower girl, and she briefly converses with Cloud Strife, a mercenary who is fleeing from the bombing of a Mako reactor by himself and AVALANCHE. The two later meet at the church in the Sector 5 slums, when he falls down from the plate and through the roof of the church. Later, when faced with the possibility of being captured by the Turks, the two join forces to escape. As he reminds her of Zack Fair, she asks him to be her bodyguard in return for one date.

She is eventually captured by Shinra and taken to the science lab, however Cloud and friends infiltrate the building and save her. She then joins them in the pursuit of Sephiroth, while embarking on a journey of self-discovery as well.

After a failed attempt to foil Sephiroths theft of the Black Materia, she ventures alone into the Forgotten City for as yet unknown reasons. Cloud and his companions follow after her, eventually finding her praying at an altar. As she looks up to smile at Cloud, however, Sephiroth appears and kills her by impaling her through the torso. The materia given to her by her mother, which she wore in her hair, falls from the altar into the water and was lost. After fighting an incarnation of Jenova, Cloud carries her body out into a lake in the Forgotten City, and releases her back to the Planet.

The party later learns the reason for her being in the Forgotten City; through her mothers materia, now known as the 'White Materia', she was able to summon Holy, the ultimate White Magic, and the only force capable of repelling the ultimate Black Magic, Meteor. Even though she successfully managed to cast Holy before her death, it was held back by the sheer force of Sephiroths will. When he was finally defeated and Holy was released, it appears that it was too late to function as effectively as it should, for Meteor - already summoned by Sephiroth and set on a collision course with the Planet - had come too near the Planet's surface.